Rangok Skies Reviews

I would write a longer review, but the trailer to Rangok Skies is very self explanatory. If watching it gets you pumped, the game delivers. If an over the top shmup isn't your thing, there is nothing in Rangok Skies that will convince you. I fall into the first category, and instantly knew the game was a winner within 10 seconds of seeing the first trailer. Looks great, sounds great, pure chaos. It seems slightly hard and unfair at first, but when you realize how many tools the game gives you to deal with the hurricane of bullets (bombs, defensive special, 3 hits per life, life refill powerups) and how frequently the game refreshes those tools, it feels tuned appropriately. I am average at shmups and made it to the last boss on my second game, so I would consider the difficulty balanced (although there are no selectable difficulty levels). I really enjoy the soundtrack and character voices. The adrenaline is cranked to 11. The graphics are bright, colorful, and impactful. Under close scrutiny, the art might be a bit generic, but you won't be scrutinizing anything while you play this game. I only have two small complaints. First, it's a bit difficult to tell which enemy attacks can get through your defensive special. That becomes less of an issue the more you play presumably, but it could have been cued better. Second, with 5 stages at $19.99, it's a bit on the short side. I would have liked to see 7 stages at that price point. Bottom line, the game is FUN, and we don't get enough shmups of this style that are well-executed these days. If you like the trailer, it's a no-brainer. Final Rating: 8.3/10

I gave a fair shake at the game, and overall I would say that there is a good game here somewhere marred by a myriad of tiny issues rather than one large thing that brings the whole experience down. In no particular order: *The sound/music of this game is fundamentally screwed and the biggest thing that detracts from everything. No matter how much I tried to mess with sound or music volume, something was always too loud and drowning out the other making me feel like I'm listening to vague white noise half the time. *A lot of the sound/music is old free to use stuff you've heard since the 90's or licensed from Heaven Variant. Some of this music is legitimately good, but something feels off like the music is peaking or the riffs are so loud that it drowns out everything else. *This shmup is the biggest cluster**** when it comes to visibility in general, sparkles from point pickups rain down, some enemy bullets change color between red and blue, some bullets are missiles that can't be destroyed and home in on you while other patterns are firing off and occasionally stacking in a horrible way. *The playspace is deceptively small, and it feels unnatural how high up the ship remains on the screen when it is at the "bottom" edge of the screen. *Some enemies are way too tanky or give little to no warning about some insanely big/quick/cheap attacks. *Ship movement is a little odd due to diagonal movement not being reduced. *I never throught I would see the day in my life anyone thought to themselves "remember the red flashing in arcade Zero Wing? Let's bring that back in the form of multiple colors whenever a bomb is used or a warning siren goes off." You can't even finish the first stage before this war crime shows up. *Some parts are CLEARLY referencing other shmups of the past, the previous drama with the old tracing stuff isn't the problem here though, it's that this game hits too close to home with some of the references that left me like "oh yea I haven't turned on Donpachi in a while, maybe I'll play that again". If this game's biggest crime was the tracing drama years back that the dev pushed an update for to avoid any legal issues, then that in itself would be a silly reason to completely dismiss this game. *Realistically unattainable unlocks. I don't know if anyone has ever dared to bother with this game so much, but one of the unlocks requires unlocking all of the achievements in the game, and one of them is "destroy every single enemy in the game in one run". I'll never get to see what this game had to offer on insane difficulty or how to unlock the 4th character even after 1cc'ing, like what the hell else am I supposed to do? This game reeks of someone who really likes shmups, had some decent ideas and some really bad ones with nobody pushing back against them telling them "NO" to some of the stupid stuff in this game. The stage 4 boss alone commits a lot of sins that tells me someone went on a powertrip during game design and hasn't played enough of the games that the store description references as inspiration to understand how nonsensical some stuff is.

This could have been an amazing game, but the developer's ego ruined it; Just provide unlimited continues. This way if a player is hardcore; they don't continue and they can get on the leaderboards. If a player just wants to have fun and doesn't care about leaderboards etc, they can continue and enjoy the entire game. (And subsequently buy another game sooner). I don't want to play your game a 1000 times or practise levels to play the whole game... Developer; get over yourself/ your game.

A bullet hell that wants to be a SHMUP....Dev's have no clue on how to make a shmup. MOVEMENT: Insanely slow - hurts trying to dodge a bizzzzlion bullets on the screen BOSS Battles: Good Luck - I feel that you need to always pick up the bombs that drop to even come close to not losing lives SPRITES: I'm not gonna state the obvious [Thieves] But its really hard to tell what is a point gem/power up/bomb and enemy bullets! Pixels are way too big for the screen size MUSIC: AWESOME! About the only great thing about the game! NO CLUE HOW TO UNLOCK THE HARD MODE?????? I beat the game in 40 mins on my second run. Low Number of Levels Game is not worth 20 bucks!!! Wait for it to go on a sale or if more levels get added to the game but they will need to steal more pixel art to do so and then remodel them! So dont expect more levels anytime soon NO INNOVATION WHATS SO EVER! Standard SHMUP! I would pay $5 bucks for it

Music, Control, and game play is spot dead on. Only complaint is the difficulty, No EASY mode, Just Normal / Hard setting. As you progress further into levels, it gets way way to difficult for average player to get to level 3 with using 1 continue. Other than that its a OK shum-up

Wonderfully old school and with lovely modern visual sheen. Reminds me of Giga Wing and Ghost Blade. One issue though- all the bullets and collectables can often become an overwhelming mess. I wish the Devs would release a patch to make the collectables and/or the background darker colours or something like that, or just opt out of collectables. However, having only played through the first 2 stages, i can already tell you that this is one shmup which all shmuppers should get. It's gorgeous and exciting, and the bullet visibility is decent.

Nice sprites and very vibrant colours! it is quite hard but it is fun and gorgeous to look at 8/10

Other than the game being a complete visual clusterfuck 100% of the time, it's pretty decent. The visual overload is just too much for me though and removes all possible fun. to paraphrase what another reviewer said, there is so much on the screen it is hard to really care about any of it. It's not just "too many bullets". It's all of the other shit happening on top of that. Smoke/fire effects everywhere, 100's of pickups dropping every second, all of the text popups for points, bombs, powerups, etc.

There's so much on the screen, with so little weight between them. It's hard to tell medals from bullets from powerups. Things move fast, but it all just flies by with little meaning. There's better games in this genre on this platform far more deserving of your time.

This game name drops lots of really good, high profile shmups in its description but fails to reach even the worst of those developers' games. There is no difficulty curve. The screen is immensely busy with so much shit from the drop that most of the times I got hit I had no idea from what because it's impossible to keep up with anything that's happening in this game. Is it bullet hell? Yes. Is it good? No. There is absolutely zero finesse involved in the creation of this game. No thought put into the flow. If you're looking for Cave quality, look elsewhere. This is garbage.